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June 28, 2013

Ouch! 8 Asset Managers Bitten Hard by Outflows

Sterne Agee releases report detailing which firms are seeing the biggest outflows from their mutual funds and ETFs

(Photo: AP)

Outflows of bond funds and other products accelerated in late June. EPFR says that for the week ending on Wednesday, long-term products saw outflows of $40.7 billion. This is just a tad under the record equity-driven outflows of early August 2011.

While fixed-income mutual funds experienced $20.1 billion of outflows during the week, their ETF counterparts saw $3.3 billion go out the door. And equity products lost $13.1 billion worldwide.

How are individual asset managers doing?

Analysis released Friday by Jason Weyeneth, CFA, and Alex Levine of Sterne Agee Asset found the following trends for companies that reported their latest outflows and inflows:

Ameriprise Financial (AMP) had long-term outflows of $1.1 billion during the week, driven by taxable bond fund outflows of $546 million. Unfortunately, many of AMP’s asset classes saw investors exit: $287 million from domestic equity, $102 million from international equity, $147 million from municipal bonds. Overall, the overwhelming driver of outflows for Ameriprise was the its diversified bond fund, which had $994 million or so of outflows.

BlackRock’s (BLK) actively managed products had outflows of $205 million last week, while iShares suffered outflows of a whopping $3.95 billion. The iShares outflows were driven by the MSCI Emerging Markets fund (EEM) and TIPS Bond Fund totaling $981 million and $532 million, respectively.

Eaton Vance “suffered long-term outflows of $177 million, driven by $202 million of municipal bond outflows,” the report said. Also, despite the dramatic move in interest rates, the group’s floating-rate fund inflows slowed to $188 million, while its large-cap value fund lost $76 million of assets.

Federated Investors’ (FII) long-term product “endured $493 million of outflows last week, driven primarily by bond funds,” though its money-market funds lost $2 billion of assets.

Invesco’s (IVZ) actively managed products suffered outflows of $931 million from long-term assets. Its PowerShares suffered $494 million of outflows, excluding the popular QQQ (QQQ).

Principal Financial Group (PFG) experienced long-term product outflows of $135 million. This movement was driven by taxable-bond outflows of $152 million, though the firm's equity platform generated $72 million of inflows for the week; the group’s global real estate fund had inflows of $47 million.

WisdomTree Investments (WETF) net outflows were $183 million for the week ending June 19. WETF will disclose more recent results on Monday.